The women’s health theme continues this week with guest Liz Tenuto who specializes in somatic healing for women. She's helped many women recover from trauma and injury for the last fourteen years. 

In this episode, we talk about how trauma is stored in the body and its effects physiologically, what you should never do when healing trauma, and some signs that you actually are healing. I loved this conversation and hope you do too! 

Some of the topics we explore:

• How trauma manifests in the body and its effects physiologically (8:52)
• Targeting the root cause or area of your body in order to release the trauma (14:23)
• The three things that you should never do while healing from trauma (17:50)
• Physical signs that you are actually healing (32:16)
• How somatics help when healing from trauma (40:16)

Resources:
Consulting with Andrea
Liz’s website
Liz on TikTok
Liz’s Free Your Hips Course

Book recommendations:
You know how I love a good personal development book, right? I’ve compiled a list of book recommendations, as mentioned in past episodes. Check out th
ese amazing book recommendations here. Happy reading!

 

Liz Tenuto specializes in somatic healing for women. She's helped tens of thousands of women recover from trauma and injury for the last 14 years.

Liz is known as “The Workout Witch” due to her ability to get people out of body pain. She offers 30 day courses and is best known for her work with hips & trauma release. Follow her on TikTok @theworkoutwitch or instagram @theworkoutwitch_

Right-click to download the episode.mp3

 

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SHOW TRANSCRIPT  

Liz  00:00
Once you release the stored trauma out of your body, you get out of that trauma drive and so you'll start to just notice like, well, I'm really tired and now I'm gonna take a nap. And now I'm gonna rest. I lived in survival mode for a long time and so it's like that for me was a really, really profound shift.

Andrea  00:20
You're listening to Make Some Noise Podcast episode number 485 with guest Liz to nudo.

Andrea  00:32
Welcome to Make Some Noise Podcast, your guide for strategies, tools and insight to empower yourself. I'm your host, Andrea Owen, global speaker, entrepreneur, life coach since 2007, and author of three books that have been translated into 18 languages and are available in 22 countries. Each week, I'll bring you a guest or a lesson that will help you maximize unshakable confidence, master resilience and make some noise in your life. You ready? Let's go.

Well, hello, everyone. Thank you for joining me again on the podcast. Welcome back. Welcome back. We are on episode two, I believe it is in the women's health theme. And I am excited to bring you today's guest because again, I found her on TikTok and I just was so intrigued by what she had to say. So I'm going to introduce her in just a minute.

But you know, one of my favorite sayings of all time is, if you want to change your life, you have to change your life. It sounds really redundant, obviously. But it's true. It's one of my favorites. Because it's so simple. And I think that a lot of us, including myself. Raise his hand. Think about changing our life. And we're like, I'm going to read this book about it, I'm going to make a list of ways to do that, I'm going to think about it endlessly, I'm going to be motivated by this, I'm going to stand in close proximity to people are changing their lives. And I really feel like that's part of the process. That's the warmup, you got it, you got to do that. And then it comes the time when you need to take some action. And if that's you, if you're at that place where you're like, okay, I'm ready, then shoot us an email, we can probably help. And by we I mean me and one of my lead coaches, if you want to go over to AndreaOwen.com/coaching, to read a little bit more about what it might look like, the information’s over there. And then you can fill out an application AndreaOwen.com/apply, it's on that coaching page, or you can send us an email if you're driving right now and you're like, I don't remember, you can shoot me a DM, or…the best way to do it is to use the contact form on our website, because sometimes those DM’s go into like the filter folder, and then I never see them and then I feel really bad, because I finally see it and it's been like 152 weeks and then I felt really guilty. So contact form on my website or the coaching page, check it out over there, and we will help you out to make a decision.

Alright, before I introduce you to today's guests, which I'm super excited about, I'm going to find a way better way to say this, in every single episode, kind of like a really fast short disclaimer. So please bear with me as I stumble through this. So this is episode 485. I've had approximately, I would say at least 400 guests about 400 guests, I would say. That's a lot of guests. And I'm just now getting around to the my guests, methodologies and opinions are their own. I don't endorse them unless I specifically tell you I have you know, I've gone through this person's program or they have been my coach before. I've had I've had a few of my coaches on and I will endorse them, and I wouldn't have them on the show. They were really amazing. But I go back sometimes and look at some of my guests and I'm like, I don't know if I'm fully in line with what they talk about anymore. They may have changed the way that they do things or may have gotten in hot water anyway. I feel like it goes without saying but I'm gonna say it anyway. The opinions methodologies, teachings educations are their own and not mine. Okay. I'm gonna move on, but I just I was just deleting something that I said that was about lettuce, because I made an error in my speech. If we could put together all of the mess ups that I have done all of the attempted puns that ended up not working and I'm like, nevermind, I'm deleting that, just in the intros, I feel like it would be pretty funny. Amy Smith, my best friend, her husband says I feel like you and Andrea are the only people to think that you're funny. I'm like, I think there's like three people that listen to my podcasts that think I'm funny sometimes…once a month, or something.

Anyway, all right, I'm gonna tell you about our guest today. Working on so break. I love you. I love that you have just stuck with me. Okay, Liz Tenuto is our guest today and if you don't know about her if you've never heard of her, let me tell you a little bit about her.  Liz Tenuto specializes in somatic healing for women, she's helped 10s of 1000s of women recover from trauma and injury for the last 14 years. Liz is known as the Workout Witch due to her ability to get people out of body pain. She offers 30-day courses and is best known for her work with hips and trauma release. You can follow her on TikTok @TheWorkoutWitch or Instagram @TheWorkoutWitch_ underscore so without further ado, here is Liz.

Liz, thank you so much for being here.

Liz  05:57
Thank you for having me.

Andrea  05:59
I have another tick tock person on. TikTok is wild. And I hope that everyone listening, if you were one of those people who are like I'm too old to be on tick tock and it's just for dancing kids, it's like you are missing out. But also it can be a bit of a time suck, don't you agree?

Liz  06:20
It can really take over some of your free time. It’s very entertaining.

Andrea  06:26
It is. That's what I say. It's wildly entertaining.

Liz  06:28
It's yeah. And the algorithm is interesting because it shows you interest based content rather than the Instagram algorithm is social based so it connects you to people that you already know and stuff. Whereas Instagram or TikTok is connecting you to people you don’t know. Yep, things that you're Googling things you're already interested in and so it'll just show you a bunch of stuff that you're like, wow, I've been looking into this.

Andrea  06:55
Okay, before we get started you and your something funny speaking of their algorithms, so I don't think I've even told my listeners this yet. I finally am 47 I finally missed a period has been regular for…and my cycles are fairly short. They're like 24 to 26 days. So I missed a period and then I was like, oh my god, could I be pregnant? So my husband had a vasectomy nine years ago. So I looked at that app like what is the incidence of failed vasectomy? Less than 1%. I'm like, okay. So it's not zero. And then and then what are the I said, What are the chances of conceiving naturally at age 47 and it was 5%. And so I was like, I could be pregnant. Like the chances are very slim. But also people get struck by lightning, you know. So it's way so because I was Googling that I started to see TikToks of women in their late 40s doing like their pregnancy test on TikTok and it coming back positive. I was like, Lord help me. So I told my husband and he immediately went to Dollar General and got a pregnancy test and like, put pushes it across the counter at me if I take it, it was negative. But the algorithm, right? I had never seen TikTok’s like that before.

Liz  08:14
Yeah, the algorithm is really specific and really detailed where you're like, this feels this feels spooky. Yeah, this feels weirdly specific to me.

Andrea  08:24
Yeah, it's very spooky. Okay, so speaking of weirdly specific, I loved your feed and all of your videos. So can we start the start from the very beginning. And I know this might be like a review for some people listening because I've had, I've definitely had people on who talk about like somatic healing and trauma stored in the body. So in your words, can you explain how trauma can be stored in the body and its effects physiologically, how like, how does it manifest for people.

Liz  08:52
So whenever someone experiences trauma, they have a physiological reaction in their body. It's a fight flight reaction. Generally, what happens for people is that they get really, really tight in their hips, in their job and in their neck. And this is very normal. This is not you can't really do anything to control it. And  it's kind of evolutionary to try to get you out of that situation. It's literally it's literally an inherited survival response. When most people experienced trauma, they often aren't able to fully process what happened right after the events, because life keeps going right? You have some traumatic event, or you have childhood trauma and lived in, you know, a traumatic environment for a really long time and didn't have the tools or the time to fully process everything right after it happened. And when that happens, you have unprocessed emotions that get stored in your body, and that creates excess stress hormones in your body so you're running on a ton of adrenaline a ton and of cortisol, it makes your psoas muscle contract, which is this huge muscle that starts under your diaphragm wraps around your lower back and connects to your hips. And so for that reason, that's why a lot of people have a ton of hip and lower back pain is because they're psoas muscle has been contracted for years or for decades, due to their trauma response. So the psoas muscle specifically contracts and then it stays contracted until you manually release it.

So the unprocessed emotions and this like chronic muscle tension that happens as part of your survival response starts to, essentially the more you experience trauma, it just starts to kind of become your new normal. And when you live with that long term you start to get this is what the stored trauma is. And you start to get health conditions that that arise due to this. So it could be gut issues, it could be sleep issues, it could be frequent headaches, it could be unexplained chest pains, but you get these pains that are frequent and consistent, that happen and you a lot of people will go to the doctor and be like what's going on, they'll give you a muscle relaxer, but they're not actually treating, like the root cause of the issue because Western doctors don't talk to you about emotional health or mental health or you know, any sort of trauma at all. So that's what's going on for a lot of people, it's actually quite common.

Andrea  11:32
I know I'm jumping way ahead right now. But I want to ask this question, because I'm just really curious. When you were talking about that, you know, that definition of trauma, which I think many of us have heard before, it's just the inability to be able to process events and circumstances that are happening in the moment. And if we break a bone, we go to the doctor and they set it in a cast, and then that bone heals. And so I'm curious like, and maybe you've never even thought about this, so sorry, if I'm kind of throwing as I promised right before we started recording, like I'm not gonna ask you anything. lies all lies, like in a perfect world, like if you could kind of like wave your hypothetical magic wand and like have doctors treat trauma like we would a broken bone, what would that look like?

Liz  12:19
I think the first step for the medical field is really to just start integrating some questions about mental and emotional health, into their diagnosis. So you know, what, if someone comes in and they have, let's say, migraines, they have migraines all the time, prescribing them a painkiller, and having them leave in 15 minutes is never going to heal that issue, it’s just gonna make them be able to function in society, which is helpful, but ultimately, they're still in a ton of pain. I think if doctors started to, you know, say like, hey, when did this when did these migraines start coming on? Did you have any life events that happened? Oh, you lost your job, or like, oh, there was a dramatic decrease in your income, and then you got headaches, like, then you can start to address more of the root cause of the issue, I genuinely believe that therapy is incredibly helpful for people with trauma healing, but unfortunately, talk therapy doesn't do any of the body healing. So you can do talk therapy for years…

Andrea  13:30
It's a great place to start.

Liz  14:17
It's a great place to start. But if you have health conditions that are trauma based, you'll still have those health conditions, you'll still have the headaches, you'll still have the hip pain, you'll still have the migraines, the gut issues, the chest pains. And so that's really where somatics is starting to come in more and more and more and have a louder voice in this kind of like, full healing journey for people. So in my ideal world, doctors would identify that there was something that happened that kind of caused this onset of more, you know, chronic hip pain and then had refer them to a somatic specialist or, you know, to a therapist, because a lot of therapists will refer people to somatic specialists.

Andrea  14:17
Right. The appropriate one. Okay. I was just curious.

Liz  14:20
Yeah, that would be my ideal I think.

Andrea  14:23
I hope that that happens, too. Same. Same here. Okay. So this question is, might be a little tricky, so I hope I asked it correctly. So are there different exercises that target different types of trauma that one might have faced that stored in your body? Or is it more…do you teach people to more like target a certain area and see what comes up?

Liz  14:46
Most people I would say 75% of people have stored trauma manifested as hip pain or lower back pain. So that's generally the root cause of the issue is in the pelvis. But some people have a lot more jaw pain and a lot more neck pain about 25%. So with the courses that I teach, I split them up so that there's a hips course and then there's a shoulders and neck course. And wherever you experience more pain is where you're storing it. In general, upper body tension, chronic upper body tension with the jaw, the neck and the shoulders tends to be more like high anxiety based. And hips, pelvis, low back, anything like in the lower body, legs, feet included, tends to be more long term depression, or grief, or sorrow.

Andrea  15:44
Yeah, both of those.

Liz  15:46
Yeah. And most people will have both of those. Yeah, so most people feel both like most folks that I work with have long term anxiety and long-term depression. I had long term anxiety and depression, as well.

Andrea  16:01
So do you work with people who so for example, actually, this coming Friday, I have a consult with a like a functional medicine doctor and I'm glad that this person kind of looks at your entire life with things like that you're talking about, and I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder last year, and the medication has been helpful for many of my symptoms. Unfortunately, the leg pain has not gone away. And I'm like, okay, I'm stretching and I'm only like walking my dog. It's not like I'm doing you know, Tae Bo or anything. Not that anybody does Tae Bo. That's the first like, high impact thing I can think of. For those who are too young to know what that is, it's kind of like before Insanity was a thing. We had Tae Bo. We had Billy Blanks. And so it's I think my question is, is it sometimes in conjunction with like a hormone imbalance? Because that's what I'm, I'm thinking might be the case for me. Like it's a combination of hormone imbalance and continued store trauma.

Liz  16:59
Yeah, absolutely. Generally, when folks have stored trauma, they have a hormone imbalance, where they're producing a ton of cortisol and a ton of adrenaline and the body's running in an imbalance and it's much more you know, those stress hormones are much more prevalent in their body. And that can cause a lot of pain and a lot of just muscle tension in general.Just kind of tension all over your body. Really, what I teach people is how to get out of pain and the release that happens within the Free Your Hips Course is really helps balance the hormones because it releases a ton of cortisol out of your system. So it disrupts your body's habitual stress response, brings you back into balance, brings your nervous system back into balance as well. So you're not too activated all the time.

Andrea  17:50
Yeah, that's interesting. Thank you for that. I'm glad to know that it's probably a combination. It'd be interesting to hear what she says. I'll give you all an update. Everybody listening. You have a TikTokthat I liked a lot where it was that trend that was going around and you know, like five things I would never do as a as an XYZ, you had three things that you would never do while healing from trauma. And I wrote them down if you don't remember what you wrote, because it was like a month ago. Do you remember what they were?

Liz  18:18
I do remember. Yeah.

Andrea 18:19
Can you talk about those three things?

Liz  18:21
Yes. The first thing is yoga. The reason why I don't suggest yoga for trauma healing, so just to clarify, I'm not anti-yoga.

Andrea  18:32
Okay, I wasn’t… I was gonna stop you because you weren't. So it's just like specifically recommended specifically for trauma healing. Like don't sign up at your local yoga thing. Okay.

Liz  18:42
Yeah, no. And the reason is, because yoga isn't designed for trauma healing, yoga is a spiritual practice that helps you deepen your connection to your body, deepen your connection to your spirituality. And oftentimes with that practice, you're pushing your body to go deeper to go further to experience more opening and that for trauma healing just isn't always the best way to relate to your body as you're healing from trauma because you're already really tight. You're already really tense and really locked up. So like stretching and pushing isn't the first thing that you want to do. Once you heal your body from trauma, once you're out of physical pain, do all the yoga. That's fine. But just somatic exercises are like clinically designed for healing trauma and for releasing start trauma out of your body. So it's the most effective route to take to get your body so it's not tight, get you so you're not in pain. So a lot of yogi's got really upset and I know that there's trauma informed yoga and I know that there's mental yoga. It's just I still suggest somatic exercises.

The cool thing about somatic exercises is we're not trying to like make people do the exercises forever, we're like, yes, you'll do these. And then you won't need to do them anymore. If you come after great. You'll always have that as a tool, you know, but like, but then after you get out of pain, and after you released your trauma from your body, go ski, go to yoga, like go do all the things that you, you know, love to do. It's just if you're like, if you're really tense, and you're really hurting, yoga is not the best. I also have some reservations about yoga, because a lot of people have religious trauma, as like, kind of part of their trauma story, and so to do yoga, you know, obviously, it depends on your teacher, some teachers are much more savvy and aware than others. But to do yoga, and then like randomly have a bunch of like Hindu, like stuff being inserted can be really triggering for people with religions. So that's just another thing that I'm like, okay. Just be mindful that yoga is a spiritual and religious practice. It's not like, it's not like therapeutic designed for healing. And that's including yin yoga, and that's including, you know, yoga for trauma. And all of that still has Hindu roots, which is great, but maybe not for everyone. Maybe not for everyone, and maybe not when you're already healing from some really intense stuff. Like, we don't really need to add a random religion in.

Andrea  21:37
Okay. So the first one, and then what was the second one?

Liz  21:44
The second one is chiropractors. So chiropractors are great if you want to just feel better tomorrow. They like really help just like pop you back into place. So if you have like an event tomorrow, and you need to feel better, you're speaking at something, you need to feel better, great, go to the chiropractor. But chiropractic care doesn't provide sustainable long-term results. It's very short term. So it just makes you in this cycle where you have to keep going back to the chiropractor, over and over and over again, without actually experiencing any real healing.

Andrea  22:21
Okay. And then the last one?

Liz  22:25
The last one, I believe, was becoming dependent on a massage therapist. Yeah. So I love massage. I am like a regular consumer of massage. I think it's very soothing and relaxing. But I have seen a lot of people in my 14 years of doing this become so dependent on a massage therapist to feel better, they have to go every week and if their person goes on vacation, they're like, distraught, you know. And you know, when you get a massage, you're completely passive. Same thing with when you get when you have a chiropractic appointment, you're totally passive, you have no clue what they're doing to you. You're just like, yes, do it. Massage me crack me. And ultimately, that doesn't empower you in your own healing. Like it can soothe you, it can help things, but it doesn't help you actually know the tools to feel better and to get you out of pain and then also make sure that you like have tools for if it ever happens, again, that you know what to do with your body. You don't become dependent on someone else to fix you all the time.

Andrea  23:32
Okay, thank you for that. That's really interesting. And just kind of the distinctions between those three and specific trauma therapy. Can you Is it ever called trauma physical therapy?

Liz  23:47
No, because physical therapists are like technically doctors and don't work at all with mental or emotional health.

Andrea  23:59
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You know what I think about too sometimes when I'm watching your work, or someone's similar on social media, and you'll see or hear people's stories of how they've experienced it, and they'll be like, and then I had this breakdown, and it was so amazing. And it felt so much better. What is a typical experience because I haven't had those big breakthroughs and then of course, I'm like, am I doing it wrong? Like is it is it normal to just like slowly over time start to feel better? Like what's typical?

Liz  27:19
So the course that I teach the Free Your Hips course that there's a very specific sequence of hip opening exercises that guarantees the store trauma release. The course is a 30 day course and most people get to the release by week three, and then it's 30 days in case you need a little extra time. So the course kind of prepares you step by step to get your body more relaxed before you have the release so it's not too intense. It's not too jarring, it's not painful at all. The release itself, it feels like this big… so you'll feel like this big huge unlocking in your pelvis and throughout your body. Like you'll go from feeling really tight to just really open like a huge opening across your whole body. Yu'll get like warm and tingly inside. It feels really good, really, really nourishing. And then you also have generally a huge, huge cry that feels like a very cleansing cry much bigger than a regular cry and it feels like you don't quite know exactly why you're crying. It just release once you open up like that physically, just a bunch of unprocessed emotions come out. And a bunch of cortisol comes out of your body. And so some people laugh some people cry, some people laugh and cry. That emotional release lasts for like 30 seconds, generally some people for a minute or so and then once you stand up from that big release, you feel like so much lighter afterwards, both physically and emotionally. It's a very like, distinctive moment that you feel. If you've done hip up opening exercises in the past, you may have experienced that before. But thhe course that I teach does like guarantee that and guides you through the step by step and how to get there within the 30 days and it's like 10 minutes per day of exercises.

Andrea  29:23
I'm going to do this one it's on your site. I'll put the link in the show notes everybody and it's like it's a self-study type of thing right?

Liz  29:30
Self-study type of thing. Yeah.

Andrea 29:32
Which I prefer that anyway. Yeah, I don’t want to be spreading my legs on camera.

Liz  29:39
Yes. Yeah, yeah, it's private. It's good to have it as a private experience too, because it's quite emotional when you have that release and so if you're by yourself, it just happens much faster and much easier rather than being in like a class or a workshop type format.

Andrea  29:56
Okay, the reason some of it caught my eye and some of your work caught my eye is because you talk about SI joint dysfunction and it's sacroiliac joint. And that I had that after I had my daughter. I know people can get it, however or with difficult childbirth. I had a really easy birth with her, she came very, very fast, which my, my Doula at the time said that can happen. You know, when you dilate so quickly. It's just a lot of trauma really like on your body. And at first I didn't know what it was I told my doctor and I said, I don't know how to explain it but I feel like my insides are going to fall out of my vagina like that. I don't know how else to explain it. And so turns out it was that. I was also running still, which I probably shouldn't have been doing and he recommended that I stopped doing that, especially on the concrete.

So I wonder now so I do think it was probably a combination of unhealed trauma that I had had from a previous abusive relationship that I was still hadn't even grieved over and then had two babies fairly quickly. And a very, you know, a physiological trauma to my body from being pregnant. And she was also a really low baby like she used to, you know what it feels like when you get a pap smear? Yeah, towards the very end. Every day I was having that feeling. I felt like she was…I would joke with my doula. And I'm like, I feel like she's doing the head spin on my cervix. And they were like, she kind of is and that who it'll take your breath away? Yeah, I don't ever want to deal with that again. So I don't know all of that to say… You know, and that was 13 years ago, she just turned 13. And like, I still am like laughing mark, because when I'm trying to say, for anybody out there. Even if for those of you listening who have not birth to child, like I think there's still things that can happen, you know, from our sexual past and just so many things that can both physical and like, you know, mental stuff.

Liz  31:58
Yeah, absolutely. SI pain and sciatica are both quite common for postnatal women. I think it's largely just due to the amount of pressure that's on your body, both while you're caring and during birth. During the labor process.

Andrea  32:16
Yeah, it's a lot. So this sort of dovetails from the question that I that I just asked about, you know, what happens during the process of doing these, in that case, the hip opening exercises. But what are the physical signs that someone is actually healing from their trauma, like beyond just the moment that you're, you're doing the exercises?

Liz  32:37
Yeah. One sign is that you'll feel like emotionally a lot more stable. You'll feel like you have like more space in between input and output to kind of process and feel your body, you'll feel a lot more connected to your body and a lot more grounded and a lot more aware of what you're feeling inside. Another indicator is that you start to sleep well, and you start to…so you start to sleep when you're tired and eat when you're hungry. Which sounds so basic.

Andrea  33:13
Oh, I get it. In a culture where we’ve been basically, like taught not to trust our instincts. That's a big one.

Liz  33:21
Yeah, like, you'll be able to recognize, like, oh, I'm hungry, and then you'll actually eat.

Andrea  33:25
Or oh, I'm full, I should, maybe I could stop eating.

Liz  33:29
Exactly. Or like, I'm tired, I'm gonna go to sleep now or I'm gonna take a nap or rest. And so having those, you know, feelings, and then being able to respond like that is a really key indicator that you're healing from trauma. There's a thing called trauma drive, which is where your body is just…you're running on stress hormones, and a lot of people who have trauma drive can still be very successful professionally, they'll like run a very successful household, you know, and have successful relationships, but they're just going so hard, and they are running on stress hormones, and ultimately probably feel really tired and fatigued all the time. But once you release the stored trauma out of your body, you get out of that trauma drive. And so you'll start to just notice, like, wow, I'm really tired and now I'm gonna take a nap. And now I'm gonna rest which at some I lived in survival mode for a long time and so it's like that, for me was a really, really profound shift to be like, ah, this is what it's my angry. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

So you'll also start to sleep better, you'll have less stomach aches, less headaches, less chest pains, less overall physical pain. Just much more ease with your movement. Much more just like general connection and awareness to yourself, to how you're feeling. The ability to cry is also a key indicator that you're healing from trauma. A lot of people, when they've gone through a lot of trauma just get to a point where they can't cry anymore. Or they've been at the brink of crying, but they're in like a social context all the time. And so they just learned how to kind of shove it down, right? And so the ability to cry, again, is a huge indicator that that you're healing from trauma. And I'm like really pro crying and public.

Andrea  35:34
Hobbies include crying in public.

Liz  35:39
I would love to be the poster child for crying in public…on your resume. I lived in worth in in Manhattan for a while and it was really helpful for me because it's so intense there. People just cry in public there all the time. And no one even bats an eyelash at them. No one is trying to help you. No one is gonna like, say anything. If you're like, on the ground crying and you look injured, people will help you. But like, if you're just on the subway, and you're crying in your chair by yourself, and you're just crying, no one's going to bother you, no one's going to talk to you. And that for me at first when I moved there, because I'm from California and at first, I was like, this is really sad but then I found it to be incredibly liberating, because I was no longer holding my emotions in anywhere. I was just fear that people would…

Andrea  36:31
Yeah, for fear that they would…

Liz  36:35
Be like, socially uncomfortable for people, like, you know. So I would just like cry on the subway because I had a rough day or someone yelled at me or you know, like, it was snowing up to my knees and I was stressed out and I would just cry. And then I'd be like, I feel better.

Andrea  36:53
Yeah, it's hard to human. It's interesting. Part of my trauma is around crying and so which I think is can be fairly common for you know, especially people my age Gen Xers raised by generations before us that were that were very…that had some opinions about expressing emotions. I'll just like to say this nicely. We don't do that.

Liz  37:19
Right.

Andrea  37:21
That's really interesting. When my dad died in 2016, my stepmom made a comment about how she's like you're handling everything…she made a comment and she wasn't being malicious with it. And it was it was kind of a compliment of, and she was surprised at how well I was holding up and I was I was I was over functioning is what I was doing. And it just made me think like, wow, I have mastered this, like I have mastered just completely shoving it down. And at that point, I'd been sober for five years, you know, it was in the middle of writing my second book. And it's interesting what coping skills trauma can create for us that in some ways can be helpful.

I always say, I take a lot away from the rooms of 12 Step programs, and one of them is it works until it doesn't. The other thing I was thinking when you were talking was, I have come to believe because for a long time, I was like, there's gonna be that one modality, that's gonna fix me. And now I realize, okay, it's a lot of different modalities, or maybe several different modalities that are going to layer on top of each other to carry me home, basically. A home being healing. I don't know when that's going to be probably not this year, unfortunately. But I say that because I've done several different things that have been helpful.

One of the things I've noticed, and I was so excited when it happened is my husband, we had a disagreement, and as couples do, and he was angry with me, I probably deserved it too. And I wasn't I didn't immediately go into like fight or flight panic because previously I would immediately go into that thought spiral of like, this is it he's leaving, he's leaving me we're gonna have to split everything. And just going into all the minutia, and also the heartbreak of him leaving because that's what I'm used to. Yeah, and for the first time I was like, oh, he's mad. We'll be fine.

Liz  39:11
Amazing

Andrea  39:12
Like the floor cracked open when I realized what had just happened. Yeah, that's kind of…when I’m not triggered.

Liz  39:18
Yeah. And like you're not catastrophizing, not catastrophe. That's another huge sign of healing from trauma.

Andrea  39:29
And I can't say like that was that was an ideal, like, it's happened again. And I was like a little bit like, it kind of probably depends on my cycle. It depends on a lot of different factors. But that was probably my biggest victory.

Liz  39:42
Hmm, congrats.

Andrea  39:44
Thank you. I still have a lot a long ways to go as probably we all do.

Liz  39:51
It's definitely a journey and like you're saying there are these different modalities that work for a specific timeframe to heal a specific thing and then you move onto the neck. Once that stops working, move on. The thing that I see so much is that people are like, I've been going to the chiropractor for three years, and it's not helping and I'm like, why aren’t you doing something else? Yeah, like don't do what's not working.

Andrea  40:16
Well, how do this might be a super vague and kind of broad question and you kind of covered a little a little bit already, but I'm wording it differently. So how do somatics help when healing from trauma?

Liz  40:27
Somatics really, really helped people who are in physical pain or who have health conditions. And a lot of health conditions, even autoimmune disorders are linked back to trauma. So there's a study that came out recently by Harvard Medical School that essentially talks about how the key indicators of whether or not you have stored trauma in your body and then what happens if those go untreated. So essentially, the key indicators are like what we've talked about earlier, frequent migraines, frequent headaches, that means more than three times per week, long term anxiety, long term depression, long term is longer than three months, chronic muscle tension, so you feel really tight, really clenched brace down in your body pretty regularly. Long term hip back or neck pain longer than three months, sleep issues, gut issues, chest pains, ringing in your ears, tinnitus, vertigo, panic attacks. All of these things are signs that you have, they're warning signs that you have trauma in your body. If those go untreated, they it gets it gets worse, it gets into autoimmune, it gets to strokes, it can get into heart attacks, and it can just your body is a sudden your nervous system is overloaded. And it's just going to start to shut down more and more and more if it goes untreated.

And so where somatics comes in, is when you have these early warning signs of you know, headaches, like just being in pain all the time, if you can catch it then, and release stored trauma from your body, all that stuff can go away and it can essentially eliminate some more serious health conditions that you might get, you know, ffrom living in this like, really activated, overwhelmed nervous system state.

Andrea  42:25
And then the other option is you're like me and my listeners, you're in your 30s 40s and 50s and it stores up.

Liz  42:31
Yeah, it does. It really does. And I think the challenging thing for so many people is that like, we don't really know about this as an option. Like, you know, that was my experience. I was in chronic pain in my 20s. And I was like, I'm way too young to be feeling like this. And I was doing therapy, I was meditating, I was doing yoga, I was doing like chiropractic care for different physical therapists, doctors naturopaths…

Andrea  42:57
Wow, you were in it to win it. Even that young.

Liz  43:01
I was reading the books, I was like, What is going on. And it wasn't until I did Cymatics that i Within four lessons, I felt significantly better in terms of physical pain. I had sleep issues and gut issues at the time, too. And then I also my mental health got a lot better within four lessons. I had chronic anxiety before starting and then within four lessons, I felt significantly less anxious. And I was like what is this somatics and the only reason why I tried it was because nothing else worked was I was like I'll give this random thing a shot.

So I was pretty young. I had an academic background in psychology and that's how I knew about it. It wasn't recommended to me. It was all from my own research that I found it and then met this woman Augustine Moore, who essentially helped me heal personally and then I started studying it and getting a lot of certifications and she mentored me and teaching for my first six years in terms of how to how to help people get out of pain when you're working with them one on one. And she passed away in 2019. That was a big reason why I got on TikTok was to… I had a lot of grief after she passed away and so I was like, let me share you know, the work that we started together. I got on TikTok because I was anonymous on TikTok because I didn't know anyone.

Andrea  44:27
Yeah, you're an early adopter, especially like, older then, 14.

Liz  44:34
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I was an early adopter. And the response on Tiktok has been like overwhelming and wonderful and I didn't realize how many people needed this work. So that's been this beautiful surprise. But yeah, my lineage is like with me the entire the entire way and having experienced it as well is really what inspires me to share it so much.

Andrea  44:58
I love your story. Thank you for sharing that with us. And I originally got interested in in just how trauma is stored in the body and it wasn't my own. I got curious because of my dad. My dad was I got sober when I was 18. So he was in his 50s. I feel like early 50s, maybe, yeah, mid 50s. And then stayed sober, but also had a really hard time, truly healing in talk therapy. And you know, from a 12 Step programs, they were very helpful in keeping him sober. But anyone in recovery will tell you there's a big difference between staying sober and actually being in recovery. And it was the recovery part that he struggled with and he had chronic depression and anxiety, to the point where he had to be hospitalized a couple of times, and then had a quadruple bypass when he was 58.

The thing that was interesting was that my dad was the most active person that I knew. He was so active, and yes, he smoked in the 80s, like most dads did, but he quit. He drank a lot of beer, but quit that too. And it's like, you would think that because of how active he was, and how in shape that he was that he wouldn't see those kinds of problems. A lot of childhood trauma. He was born in 1936, very, very strict Catholic upbringing, lots of religious trauma, and other traumas that I think he didn't even scratch the surface with. And so I kept thinking to myself, there is something there. Like, it's more than just maybe his genetics with, you know, coronary artery disease. Sure, that probably played a part played a part. But it just, it just got me so curious about it. And just from like, a, like a gut instinct, and like, I know that his the sadness and grief and fear that he carried around affected his physical health. I know. Yeah, it was heartbreaking to watch that as his daughter, who didn't I didn't have the tools to help him like I didn't even have the makes me emotional even thinking about it. Like I didn't even have the capacity to hold space for him. You know, it's hard when it's your dad. So the company very interested in in the work, which then of course, brought me to my own stuff, which it often does, you can't run away from it.

Liz  47:06
Yeah, unfortunately, unfortunately.

Andrea  47:10
It's been also I'm also very fascinated with my listeners are always hearing me talk about the differences in the generations and I think that now I have so much compassion for the silent generation, which was my dad and baby boomers and even Gen X, which I'm a part of, you know, we didn't have the language that, you know, my kids do now. And I think that, generally speaking, I think that Gen Xers were kind of the first generation to go to therapy, even though it was taboo. It was made fun of, it was, you know, was spoken about in in whispers. But I think we were like in so much pain. And we're like, I can't keep doing this. Now we are the parents of millennials and Gen Z and we're like, go to therapy. Go to an appointment. It’s not taboo anymore. Please don't go no, and have it be taboo anymore. Anyway, that's the longest short of how I got here to be so interested in the topic.

Liz  48:11
The generations, we're all just getting, like you're saying more language, more understanding. And then culturally, we're becoming a lot more aware of how our emotions do affect our physical health. Whereas we didn't used to even discuss it, like, mental health used to be taboo, I would say even like pre COVID, it was a lot more taboo than it is now. And, you know, doctors just treat your physical body and they're just like, here, have this pill and it'll, you know, it'll fix, it'll take it's a painkiller, it'll walk in, or it'll block the anxiety, beta blocker or whatever. So, I think, you know, we're really starting to culturally become a lot more aware of like, oh, everything is connected and if I heal emotionally, it's gonna heal, it could heal my physical body in a way that might help me gain more years on my life.

Andrea  49:06
Yeah, I agree with that so much. I love this conversation. Thank you so much. And I love the work that you do. Is there anything that you want to circle back to that we talked about or even that we didn't talk about that you want to make sure that you say before we say goodbye?

Liz  49:20
Oh, yeah, I just want to say with massage, I think massage is really helpful for trauma healing overall for people introduces like, safe touch for bodies, and I think that's for a lot of people really, really important, but just don't become dependent on someone else to fix you.

Andrea  49:42
You're like, I don't hate massage. And where do you want people to go to learn more about you? We'll have links to the show notes and I'll make sure and put that specific link to your head over here. hip opener course I think it's only like $37. So it's super affordable. And do you want them to go to your website or to tick tock or both?

Liz  50:06
Yeah, if you're interested in the courses, those are available on my website, TheWorkoutWitch.com. There's even a quiz over there where you can input where you feel pain, any health conditions that you have and what your main goals are, so that you can get a customized recommendation for what course is best for you. Yeah, the trauma release course is the Free Your Hips course that's the one that releases stored trauma. And if you're just interested in like learning more, or trying some of the exercises, check out my TikTok @TheWorkoutWitch, and then I'm on Instagram as well @TheWorkoutWitch_ a little underscore at that.

Andrea  50:46
Okay. Okay. Yeah, there's lots of different exercises that you do there so people can check it out before they want to make the plunge. And thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it. And it's been thank you so much getting to know you. You're welcome. And everyone, thank you for your time for listening. I'm so grateful that you choose to spend your time over here with us today. And remember, it's our life's journey to make ourselves better humans and our life's responsibility to make the world a better place. Bye for now.

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